RAF Boulmer
visit to
A Flight , 202 Squadron
by the
Cleveland Aviation
Society
14 January 2015
With the impending end
of RAF Search And Rescue operations , and the Royal Navy too ! ,
I thought it was time , if at all possible to visit one of our
local SAR bases to pay our thanks for their seemingly endless
years of service and to bid farewell to the venerable Sea King .
The north east coast of England is blessed with not one but two
such SAR bases in Boulmer and Leconfield but come September
there shall be none , possibly ?
The impending run down
of the military SAR service has been well documented in the
aviation , and indeed general press , but full civilianisation –
terrible phrase – terrible action , of the SAR force as we know
it will be complete by the year end with A Flight being one of
the last units to go at the end of September . As I understand
it there is something of a grey area in the handover period
which may mean that the venerable Sea King and her much reduced
crew numbers may fly on for a short while until the grey becomes
black or white ? As we found out from this visit many of the SAR
crews have already either been given their future posting within
the RAF helicopter fleet or are joining the opposition and quite
surprisingly , to me anyway , quite a few are doing just that .
The RAF SAR run-down is
something along the lines of Leconfield and Lossiemouth to go by
the end of March followed by Valley and Chivenor and then
Wattisham with presumably the individual flights ‘standing down’
until both 22 and 202 Squadrons finally disband at a future date
? The Sea King HAR3 entered service in 1978 and
was followed by the HAR3A in 1996 .
After an introductory
brief on the Sea King , what it does and how it does it and does
it very well too , we went outside into the biting north east
wind to have a look around and in Sea King HAR3 XZ586 with F/L
Skippy Harvey drawing
the short straw with the outside walk-arounds while
Clem and Cuthy did
the office and winch/radops respectively . We then moved into
the hangar to thaw out where the flights other Sea King HAR3
XZ590/F was undergoing maintenance on it’s main and tail rotors
. Both of these aircraft have between 12 to 15,000 airframe
hours which I believe is similar to the other Sea Kings on SAR
duty ?
As an appreciation of
our thanks for both the visit and A Flights operational role we
presented a cheque to their nominated charity The Boulmer
Volunteer Rescue Service and before leaving the base we made a
small detour to visit and photograph the gate guard , Phantom
FGR2 XV415/E .
One more detour on the
way home was a quick visit to see the mortal remains of
Whirlwind HAR10 XJ723
which sits in a plant hire yard on the northern outskirts of
Newcastle . A tenuous link between the Whirlwind and Boulmer is
that it was once on the strength of
202 Squadron and there
is every chance that sometime during its operational life that
it too , once flew from Boulmer . And so as the Sea King
prepares to retire gracefully from Boulmer somewhat
disappointingly it’s once proud predecessor the Whirlwind
appears to slowly edging it’s way towards the scrapman !
With grateful thanks to
all at A Flight , 202 Squadron for hosting us and in particular
F/L Campbell Blake and
Corporal Kyra Thompson as well as
Clem ,
Cuthy and
Skippy !
7 February 2015